Selfie queen

The selfie is, of course, a major, and to me mysterious, phenomenon of our age. The sheer indefatigability of selfie-takers, not to mention their number, is amazing. Recently, I stayed in an apartment not far from the Trevi Fountain in Rome — a selfie-magnet so powerful that not only was it surrounded by a dense crowd during daylight hours, but a small, determined knot could still be spotted late at night, doggedly snapping away in the dark under a steady drizzle.

This global fixation adds an extra interest to the retrospective of work by Cindy Sherman at the National Portrait Gallery. She has been making pictures of herself, and little else, for more than four decades. Indeed, it is hard to think of an artist who has documented her own features so exclusively (Gilbert & George are the only comparison that comes to mind).

Sherman was at it in the mid-1970s, long before the front-facing camera was added to smartphones, thus changing human behaviour, at least around well-known views and monuments.